Missouri House Bill 2044, entitled “Parental Oversight of Public Libraries,” is courting intense controversy because of its bold approach to modern censorship. Coverage of the bill has honed in on the bill’s apparent designs to imprison librarians and ban reading materials. The bill’s sponsor, Republican Ben Baker, sits on the Elementary and Secondary Education Committee and is a minister, missionary, and former professor at Ozark Bible Institute. In an interview regarding the bill’s inspiration, Representative Baker explained that he introduced the bill because of library reading events featuring Drag Queens and what he views as “an agenda by certain groups to introduce children to inappropriate adult themes using the vehicle of the tax funded library to do so.” He claims that his bill does not contain any provision to ban literature or jail librarians, which is how it’s being reported. He laments: “Most of the media and negative response is from those who are too lazy to read the actual bill but instead form their opinions based on headlines that are not objective.”

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The National Football League (NFL) is the most watched sports league in the United States. For example, in 2019 roughly three quarters of the top 100 most-watched broadcasts in America were NFL games. Because of this, the NFL maintains very tight control over its television rights and makes billions every year in Television rights deals with the major networks. However, some of that control may be taken away from the NFL and placed in the hands of the individual teams themselves, depending on the result of a federal suit that is currently being appeal to the Supreme Court.

“You never want a good crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emmanuel, President Obama’s Chief of Staff, once famously said. It seems that Attorney General William Barr and Senator Lindsey Graham were listening.

Last month, Bloomberg reported that Senator Lindsey Graham was planning to introduce legislation which would purport to hold tech companies accountable for allowing child pornography to be shared on their sites. The central change proposed by the bill is that it would allow for companies to be sued for recklessly distributing child pornography. If this sounds like a reasoned and principled stand to you, you might want to look a little more closely at what it means to “recklessly distribute” child pornography.

As suggested in Part One of my two-part series on the application of the first sale doctrine to digital sales, the legislature should make clarifications and updates to The Copyright Act to apply the first sale doctrine to digital property, and end the chilling effects of uncertainty on innovation in the secondary sales market.

As it turns out, millennials aren’t the only ones scrolling through the various news feeds on social media. In recent years, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has taken a keen interest in perusing the numerous social media platformsWith the rise of social media usage, many companies have started harnessing the power of influencer marketing as a way to reach millions of potential new customers. As one of our previous blog posts mentioned, influencer sponsorships are big business, with some celebrity figures commanding hundreds of thousands of dollars for product endorsements.